Finish It Friday (Yes, really!)

I started this quilt last summer (see here, where my completely unwarranted optimism is hilarious in retrospect.) My problem is once I miss a deadline (like a wedding) my instinct is not to finish it as fast as possible, but to be like, "Oh well. It's already late." And so I end up finishing wedding quilts many months after the wedding. :)

The building in the background is the courthouse in my tiny hometown. I love it. A more skilled photographer could do more with that backdrop, but I was in a hurry. And my mom's arms were tired of holding up the quilt. :)

The recipient was visiting her family in Nebraska, and I got to go see her for her birthday. That spurred a hurry to finish. My best friend helped me baste it, as she is interested in learning to quilt. We accidentally pinned half of it to the carpet and had to re-baste. Rookie mistake. :) Anyway, at the recipient's birthday party, I found out she'd be in Grand Rapids the following week for business. Coincidentally, I also happened to be going to Grand Rapids the following week to visit my boyfriend. This bought me another week to work on the quilt.

And I finally finished it!!!

It's nearly Independence Day, so please enjoy how I went all 'Murica! with this photo, capturing a waving flag with my quilt.

We had lunch together and she loved her new quilt! Just in time for the hottest part of a midwestern summer, of course. ;)

 The backing is a Simon + Kabuki print (from the line "Nesting"--not bad for newlyweds, eh?) that I got for super cheap on eBay. I've never ordered fabric from eBay before, and it is a little scary since you don't have some of the assurances you have with other online retailers. And I admit that this did smell faintly of cigarette smoke (urgh) when I got it, but it wasn't overpowering and seemed to dissipate over the year (urgh) that I had it sitting around waiting to back the quilt.

 I was very nervous about quilting the stars. I thought I'd use the walking foot, but the idea of all of that turning and shoving the quilt through my machine's throat made me want to cry and throw things. So I marked it and FMQed it. SOOOO much easier. Seriously, it went very quickly and it turned out, if not perfectly, pretty darn good. I did do something very stupid, which was sew around the perimeter of the quilt way too early in the process. It meant that I had no room to ease fabric as I did some of the lengthwise quilting, and there was some bunching and puckers. Oops. Lesson learned.

 In other news that makes me feel productive and accomplished, I ground down and refinished my super-cloudy headlights myself and they look AMAZING.

One down, one to go. Or, before and after. 

I've had Sebring for 10 years, since I started college. He's 11 years, 151,000 miles young, and is still a champ!

Scary-competent. And try not to covet my socks too hard.

This is long already, but if you are a Google reader person you should switch over before July 1st but you already know this and if you want to use Bloglovin' the link is on the side of my blog etc etc. :)

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Linking up with Finish It Up Friday, because I finally did, darn it!

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Paper Piecing? Moi?

This post is dedicated to Kristy, whose always-inspirational and always super cute paper pieced blocks made me think that it was something I might actually want to try some day. :)

I've been really afraid of paper piecing. It just looks complicated, you know? Stuff is backwards, upside down, inside out, and who knows what else. I'm not the most spatially aware person on the planet, so it seemed rather daunting to me. But the time to try it had finally come. I sensed that the time had arrived when Quilt Story featured a paper piecing tutorial using one of the prettiest blocks around. I had been kicking around an idea for a paper pieced mini in my head for some time, the only thing that remained was, well, learning to paper piece.

So I did.

Yup, that's it. I haven't even finished that block (I'm going to though, I promise.) I figured that was enough practice. An eighth of a block. I'm pretty much a pro now.

So I decided to make my own pattern, because why not? Oh, and I wanted to make a letter--a letter in which direction mattered (this is the logo for my alma mater and its associated sports teams, of which I am a fan.) If I was honest about how long I spent thinking about which way the pattern should face for the final block "N" to turn out correctly... well, I'd be embarrassed, and you'd be underwhelmed with my intellect. :)

The "N" stands for "'Nowledge"!

I couldn't really figure out how people knew what order things should be sewn in, though I knew it would be easier if I made sure that I wasn't running into situations where I needed multiple seams on a single piece of fabric. So I guessed and chopped it into five pieces because that was the only way I could think to make it work. And I forged ahead.

At this point, I was still pretty skeptical that this was going to resemble anything in a Latin-derived alphabet.

But yet again, I forged on, and before I knew it, it had come together pretty darn well! I was so proud of myself and sent numerous texts to my boyfriend detailing my incredible rise to genius and demanding validation of my brilliance. (Maybe the "N" stands for "needy.")

 I'm pretty excited about my new skill. I haven't fallen in love with it like many people have (at least not yet), but I do like that I'm not afraid to try it now. I'd really like to make another one of these for my mom and send it to her as a surprise. I'm planning to quilt it up and make it into a little door or wall hanging.

In a non-related note, a roving horde of seventeen wild turkeys rambled through my backyard last week. Seventeen! Doesn't that seem like a lot? I've never lived anywhere where turkeys are uncommon, and I don't think I've ever seen more than three or four at a time. I am suspicious of their motives, but I let my cat out to investigate, and his response was to try to eat one of my mums, so he must not have felt too threatened.

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Go Green! Go White! Go to the Beach!

Hey! I finished something!

I'll get it out of the way: these photos are horrible. It was storming Thursday morning and super dark, and to make matters worse, my boyfriend lives in a cave. Not really, but a man apartment has pretty much the same amount of light as a cave.

My boyfriend is going on vacation to South Carolina this next week with his family. I was invited to go too, but Cornell is ruining my life* by starting classes on the 22nd. Life is full of these little disappointments, I suppose. Anyway, last week I was struck by the brilliant(?) idea to make him a beach blanket. I knew it needed to include Michigan State fabric, because that is his alma mater, and I saw this blanket's future life as a tailgate companion. The problem, of course, is that they do not sell Michigan State fabric in Nebraska, which is where I was until last Friday night. So I bought the other fabrics and cut the squares and binding strips before I left Nebraska.

*I know, cool it, Drama Llama. Cornell is only ruining my chance to lay on a lovely beach with my boyfriend reading non-challenging literature. Not my entire life. I guess.

On Monday afternoon, I bought the MSU fabric and cut those squares (with a really crappy pair of scissors, I might add). I wanted to surprise him with the quilt, so that meant my sewing time was limited to while he was at work. I took down my work station every day so he wouldn't suspect anything. Luckily, he's not that observant, and I just shoved my sewing machine behind a chair and he never noticed. :)

Fortunately, I had a lot of help during this sewing marathon.

On Tuesday afternoon, I sewed together the top. (There is something satisfying about sewing together those big squares! It took practically no time at all.) On Wednesday afternoon, I basted and tied the quilt. Thursday morning, before I left to drive from Michigan to New York (hahaha, I'm crazy) I sewed on the binding. I think the whole thing (less cutting) took me 8-9 hours--less time than it took me to drive from Michigan to New York.

There were some challenges with this quilt, in spite of its simplicity. One, of course, was keeping it a secret. But the other, biggest challenge was basting. Has anyone else tried to baste on carpet? It's a huge quilt and I had literally nowhere else to go. So I tried to safety pin the bottom layer to the carpet and work from there. It was not ideal, but since I tied it instead of quilting it, it worked well enough. I don't think it would make a tight enough baste for quilting though. I'm curious if anyone else has had experience with this.

This is also the first quilt I tied. I used perle cotton thread (size 3, I think.) I had no idea what kind of needles to use. I couldn't get the thread through the first tapestry needles I got, so those were out. I had also bought a package of "doll needles," which are about five inches long and look pretty dang creepy. The package said "ideal for tying quilts." I think "ideal" is overstating things, but they did get the job done. It took almost exactly two hours to tie the whole quilt, so it was relatively quick. (Thanks to Lyn for suggesting Connecting Threads' tutorial on tying!) I've decided I don't love the look of tying, but I think it probably has its time and place (such as a last minute beach blanket, for example.)

Unexpected downside of a tied quilt--boyfriend's cat thinks I crafted her a special toy of fun, dangling threads. Oops.

This was my first scrappy binding too. I love how it looks! I forgot to get a picture of it finished (and boy, was it a crappy binding--but I was in a hurry! Rebecca will be happy to know that my time constraints emboldened me to try binding without pins, and I actually think I'd do that again) but here it is laid out pre-binding.

It's a big quilt (80" x 80")! Maybe too big. :)

Anyone recognize the backing? It's an Ikea duvet cover. I didn't even undo the middle seam, I'm so lazy. I just cut three sides open, pressed the remaining seam, and pinned the whole thing to the carpet for basting. Voila! Instant backing.

 I left it on his bed for him as a surprise when he got home from work. He was very surprised and very happy with it! It turns out that guys don't really care if the binding is on exactly straight or not. Now I just hope it holds up on the beach! Also, a big thanks to everyone who weighed in on my last post with opinions/advice about tying!

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Tropical Table Runner

Finished Table Runner and Machine Binding Maiden Voyage

I finished up my sister-in-law's birthday present, and I'm really happy with how it turned out! She loves all things tropical, and I hope I've captured that here. I used Amy's easy table runner tutorial, which is, as the name implies, very easy.

As I mentioned when I bought the fabrics, I'm not a huge batik person. But I really love the backing fabric I chose. I might even like the back more than I like the front!

My strips are (somewhat) randomly sized: I used 1.5", 2", and 2.5" strips and just cut a few of each size out of each fabric. This is a quilt-as-you-go project, so the lines on the back of the runner aren't evenly spaced (they could be though, if you chose to use strips of the same size). I added some additional quilting, just eyeballing it every inch or so. So some strips on the front ended up with two or three quilting lines, and some only one. You can see how it looks on the back too.

Always remember to photograph quilting projects in their natural habitat.

This was also my first attempt at machine binding. It was nice to try that on a smaller quilt to see how I liked it. However, it didn't go perfectly:

Some puckering! Some unevenness! Oh my!

So here's what I learned about machine binding (I used Amy's tutorial for that too).

1. I HATE invisible thread. I didn't know where the stitching would end up on the backside, so I got some invisible thread to use in the bobbin. That... didn't work. At all. I couldn't even get the bobbin to wind. I don't know if it was the kind of thread I got, or my old machine, or just something I did wrong, but it was a disaster. It just kept breaking when I tried to wind it. So I cut my losses and decided to just use white thread. It does show--quite a bit--but I decided to just consider it "bonus quilting."

Has anyone had any success with invisible thread, or is it just not worth the hassle?

2. The binding ends up being very uneven (skinny on the back and wide on the front). This could be solved by not pulling it so tightly around from the back, and in the future, I would probably do that, because I'd like just a little more binding on the back than I ended up with. The nice thing about the unevenness is that I knew I wasn't going to have stitches showing up in my binding on the backside. The downside then, is that the stitching on the back is pretty far away from the binding on the back. (You can see that in close-up of the back, above.)

3. I will probably continue to hand bind my more meaningful quilts (baby quilts, wedding quilts, etc.) I just like the look better. However, this is a great technique to have in my back pocket, and I'd never hesitate to use it for a wall hanging, table runner, or other small project. It's even good to have on hand if I'm ever short on time for a "meaningful" quilt-- this is certainly MUCH faster than hand binding!

So, a cute birthday gift for my sister-in-law and a good learning experience with a new technique for me. I hope she likes it!

Linked up at Canoe Ridge Sew Modern Monday and Plum & June's Get Acquainted Link Up.

Jam Session

On Saturday, I spent the afternoon (too gorgeous to be inside, I regret to say! But so it goes.) making this:

Heavenly!

...into this:

One batch strawberry, one batch triple berry.

You really haven't lived until you've undertaken a canning project in an apartment kitchen.

The blood of many berries was shed.

Thankfully, I had great help:

This thing really is great though. If you are ever making jam or eat a lot of strawberries, it is well worth the money. There are cheaper ones out there, and I used to have one before my mom got me this one, and they do not work. This one, however, does. It takes out only the minimum of the actual fruit, it's easy to dispose of the top once you cut it out, and in short, it's just a great tool. I happened to see that it's featured in Cook's Illustrated this month too, and they say it's great for tomatoes as well. But I hate tomatoes, so I wouldn't know. :)

Now Playing


We're always looking for ways to freshen up our playlists, right? I've decided to feature a few songs from time to time, just for fun.* :) I was feeling pretty uptempo today.

1. Origins-- Tennis
2. MoneyGrabber-- Fitz and the Tantrums
3. New in Town-- Little Boots

*Note: I am really not a lyrics person, and enjoy songs even without knowing what they're saying (sometimes more when I don't!) As a result, some of these may have questionable thematic content. Listen at your own risk.

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A Purse Fit for a Queen

Ta-da!

Well, maybe not fit for a queen. She'd probably prefer something designer and something pastel.

Isn't this chart wonderful? Vogue Magazine did this. If you squint, it looks like a modern quilt design. 

But for a 20-something Anglophile, I think it will be just perfect. I'm really pleased with how it turned out!

Now for all of the details: I used  Oh Fransson's pattern for her Margaret bag. This is the first bag I've ever made,* and I was really pleased with the pattern. There are many photos and the steps are explained very well. I really have no complaints about the pattern at all. 

*Now that I think about it, that's not true. I made a tote bag for my piano books when I was in 4-H, because I was just that cool. I also made a drawstring bag out of some terrific early-90s fabric that looked spray-painted in neon colors. My taste has always been impeccable.

What I did not like about this bag was the thickness of it. While that is nice in the end result, the outer lining of the bag (and the handle) had two layers of interfacing as well as a flannel interlining. So at times when sewing the thing together, I was stitching through... 47 layers of fabric (I think that's right. I was an English major, math isn't my strong suit.) So it was tough to press pleats into that and to wrangle the thing together at times. For that reason, and although the pattern is clear, I might recommend this to someone with a bit of sewing experience under their belt, just because it was difficult at times. If you're an ambitious beginner though, go for it. Just understand you'll probably swear at the thing a few times.

If/when I make this bag again (I'd like to make one for myself!), I might be tempted to try it with just a single layer of interfacing and no interlining. I don't think I'd really mind a floppier bag and might find it worth it for easier working and reduced material costs.

Things I learned:

• I absolutely do not miss sewing curves.
• Be aware of directionality in a project like this. Luckily, I noticed that at the beginning and avoided any problems with downward facing crowns or upside down lettering, but that could be so easy to overlook! When in doubt, choose non-directional prints or solids, though keeping directionality did not require any extra fabric in this project.
• Well-constructed bags can be expensive! By that I mean that they require a lot of fabric and a lot of stiffening material. Since I used a fancy quilting cotton for this (indeed, the print was the whole inspiration for the project, so I couldn't really cut corners on this one), the cost really added up. 

A few photos of the process:

The incredible thickness of the outer layer.

Unparalleled seam matching! (Ha ha.)

If a stitching line could be sexy, this one would... not be.

Finished product!

I love that it has pockets inside!

Happy Diamond Jubilee to the Queen! Sixty years on the job, even one that is merely ceremonial, is pretty impressive. But more importantly, congratulations to my dear friend on her masters degree! I hope the bag will be used and enjoyed.

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All Framed Up Baby Quilt

Well, here it is: my first attempt at quilting! A sweet little baby quilt for my best friend's first baby.

The colors were what she had requested during her baby shower, so I let that guide my selection, and I have to say, I like her taste! The turquoise and lime green are sweet and happy, but not too girly-girl. And I love the design of the quilt--modern, and it really makes the bright colors pop. (Directions for this pattern can be found here.)

In retrospect, this was probably not the ideal first quilt. I looked at it and thought "Oh, it's all straight lines and squares! How hard can that be?" Hard, it turns out. Sewing together the center four patches went smoothly, but joining together the framing strips of squares turned out to be a bit more difficult-- they stretched out, and with so many seams, there were plenty of opportunities for inaccuracies to mount. I ended up having to do a fair amount of easing in order to line them up, and I did have some puckers, but I decided I didn't care that much, and neither would the baby. :) Now that I've tackled this once, it's a pattern I would probably use again, but maybe I'll wait until I try a few other quilts first!

I used turquoise flannel on the back. This was largely a nostalgic choice, as my aunt made a quilt for me when I was born that was backed with pink flannel, and I loved sleeping with my "fuzzy" quilt as a child. The downside, of course, is that a plain back showed my not-yet-impressive quilting skills in all of their, uh, glory:

Ah well.

I went the simple route with the quilting, being too nervous to try something else and on a bit of a time crunch. This would have looked pretty with all-over quilting, or even just straight lines over it, but I went with stitch in the ditch (which was a little harder than I thought it would be!) I'll try something else on my next baby quilt. I think quilting is the most intimidating part of this whole process to me, but I'm sure I will get better at it.

Pros:
--Easy to figure out spacing since I was following the existing pattern of the blocks.

Cons:
--So much turning of the quilt! Yikes.
--Straight lines can be harder than they look.

I thought laying out the quilt was a lot of fun. The most appealing aspects of quilting to me are the fabrics and colors, so I loved getting that first glimpse of what it would look like when it was finished. My cat loves this part too--you can see a threatening paw in the top right corner of this photo.

Adding in the sashing strips was fun too. I didn't have a lot of trouble lining up the sashing and posts with the blocks (a testament to my mother's assistance in squaring up the blocks, which were pretty off after all of the stretching and easing I did!)

My binding choice was unremarkable, but I think it looks nice. It was just one of the medium-range turquoises I used in the quilt. In the future, I think I'll play around more with prints and stripes in the bindings, but it seemed scary on this one! I accidentally used a machine binding tutorial, but sewed it by hand-- this meant that I sewed with the machine on the back first, and then did hand tacking on the front! Oops. Fortunately, my hand stitching is pretty neat, and it looked fine at the end. It took me a long time to sew on, and I watched almost half of the first season of Deadwood while sewing it on! Wild West whorehouses, gambling, violence, and a neatly hand-stitched quilt binding. What a hobby. :) 

Since I'm new to this, it seems right to list some of the big lessons I learned with this quilt.

1. Just because there are only straight lines doesn't mean that a quilt is "easy." Lots of seams can really complicate things! One should be prepared to be very, very accurate and to know that there will probably be some difficulty getting things to "fit" due to stretch and inaccuracy.

2. Stitch-in-the-ditch has its appeal, but it's not necessarily the easiest method of quilting--or the fastest.

3. No matter how things look when it's going together, it will probably look ok when it's done. I looked at some of my blocks when I was making them and wanted to cry because they looked so off-kilter or had so many puckers. At the end of the project, the overall effect was still a good one, in spite of the inaccuracies and mistakes.

4. When hand-stitching a binding, machine-stitch to the front first, not the back.

5. Most importantly--perfection isn't required! I can be a perfectionist in some parts of my life, but early in this project I was able to abandon that expectation. I decided that this was my first quilt and that I was just going to forge ahead and see what happened, since it was pretty unrealistic to expect perfection at this point. And you know what? I loved how it looked. There are some strips that are different sizes than others. There are a LOT of puckers on the front. My stitch-in-the-ditch veered out of the ditch routinely. This sucker isn't winning any quilt shows. But the overall effect is great, the colors are lovely, and--most importantly--my best friend loved that I had taken the time to make a gift like this for her baby. 

At the end of the day, I am very proud of my first quilt!

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